LONDON — Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein will not be charged with indecent assault in Britain, prosecutors said on Thursday.
The Crown Prosecution Service, which authorized two counts of indecent assault against Weinstein in 2022, said it had decided to drop the charges because there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.”
“We have explained our decision to all parties,” the CPS said in a statement. “We always encourage potential victims of sexual assault to come forward and report the assault to the police, and we will prosecute wherever our legal test is met.”
Weinstein became the main villain of the #MeToo movement in 2017, when women began going public with his actions. After the revelations were made public, British police said they were investigating multiple allegations of sexual assault that took place between the 1980s and 2015.
In June 2022, the Crown Prosecution Service said it had authorised London’s Metropolitan Police Service to lay two charges of indecent assault against Weinstein in relation to an alleged incident in London in 1996. The victim was aged in her 50s at the time of the announcement.
Unlike many other countries, Britain does not have a statute of limitations for rape or sexual assault.
Weinstein, who has denied raping or sexually assaulting anyone, remains in custody in New York awaiting his retrial in Manhattan, prosecutors said in August.
After the retrial, he is expected to begin serving a 16-year prison sentence in California for a separate rape conviction in Los Angeles, authorities said. Weinstein was sentenced in Los Angeles in 2022 while already serving a 23-year sentence in New York.
His 2020 conviction in Manhattan was overturned earlier this year when the state’s highest court ruled that the judge in the original trial had improperly allowed testimony against Weinstein based on allegations that were not part of the case.
Weinstein, co-founder of the entertainment company Miramax and the film studio The Weinstein Company, was once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, having produced films such as “Pulp Fiction” and “The Crying Game.”
___
Associated Press writer Brian Melley contributed to this report.
ABC News
